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and water under farmers' practices--which is what we want to know.
The second strategy is long-term trials. These do take place on research stations. The trials have been carefully tailored to the sites. At Nubaria, we are dealing with newly-reclaimed, calcareous soils; these can have poor water infiltration and poor fertility. Prevailing crop sequences are berseem/maize, wheat/maize and wheat/tomato. Given the deficiency of nitrogen, which is common in these soils, we will be looking hard at berseem. It is a feed legume, so it fixes nitrogen, but it is cut four or five times a year; could it therefore be using so much of nitrogen that it is actually counterproductive?
The issue of nitrogen is important because we suspect that farmers are overusing fertilizer. This has two consequences. First of all, it is expensive. There have been great changes in the administration of agriculture in Egypt over the last 10 years or so, all designed to make agriculture more profitable and more responsive to the market. Compulsory delivery quotas and fixed farm-gate prices have gone. But so have subsidies on inputs like fertilizer. This overuse is costing farmers money. Second, surplus fertilizer will be leached back into the water supply because of overuse of water and badly-timed nitrogen application. This has environmental consequences. There is not much evidence of fertilizer pollution in the Nile itself, but there is mounting evidence of it in the reused irrigation water. We must help farmers find ways to stop this. The waste of nitrogen also occurs on calcareous soils for the same reason that water wastage does--far from being leached, it can simply stay on the surface.
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rural appraisals (RRAs) by a multidisciplinary team that was equipped to look at different aspects, such as crops, soil/water and socioeconomic factors. The scientists talked to farming communities at a number of sites to find out what their problems were, and what they saw as the main issues. Going by the impressions received, the team moved on to a more detailed study and multidisciplinary surveys, using a specific questionnaire on soil/water. The findings were discussed between national and ICARDA scientists to select tested variables and crop rotations which would need to be studied in the field for different agroecological areas of Egypt.
There were several different environments to be looked at. Two sites in the newly-reclaimed land, newly-exploited for agriculture, were chosen: Nubaria, with calcareous soil, and Bustan, with sandy soil.
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Other sites were El Serw, with heavy clay saline soils; Sids in Middle Egypt, selected as typical of the old cultivated land; and Rafah in Northern Sinai, which is rainfed.
At these sites, two basic strategies are being followed. The first is long-term monitoring. This takes place in the areas surrounding the fixed sites, not on the research stations. The joint teams of researchers, which include extensionists, meet the individual farmers twice a year. These farmers were carefully selected to represent different aspects of resource use. Some have plenty of water, as their land is at the head of an irrigation canal; others have land at the tail end and have less water. With their help, both socioeconomic and biophysical data is taken. The biophysical data, coming as it does from farmers' fields, rather than from a research station, give us a clear indication of what happens to the soil
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